--- title: 'Exploratory Data Analysis: OpenBeta Climbing Data (2022)' author: "Nina" date: '2022-05-30' output: pdf_document tags: - R Markdown - plot - regression categories: - R - Visualizations ---
The population of climbers is exploding and we need more and better access to data to make the sport more accessible. I am using data provided from OpenBeta, a nonprofit built and run by climbers that enables “open access and innovative uses of climbing data” (1). I built a Shiny app that includes a map of sport and trad climbing routes in Oregon ranked by route quality and a recommendation engine tailored to the user of any skill level.
Following the sport of climbing’s Olympic debut in Tokyo 2021 and the success of films like Free Solo featuring Alex Honnold (2018) and The Dawn Wall featuring Tommy Caldwell (2018), the industry is seeing historic growth and opportunities for new, profitable markets. According to Forbes, Google searches that included the term “climbing” reached an all time high in the first week of August 2021; the same time frame that men’s and women’s combined events were held (2). Not only is the sport gaining a bigger audience, but it is also attracting regular people like you and me to take a crack at the crag. Following the pandemic, nearly 100 climbing gyms have opened in North America and profits of El Cap, one of America’s largest operators of climbing facilities, saw a 100% increase in online interactions (2).
One concern with the sport’s booming popularity is the barrier to entry and as a result, there has been a push to make the sport more accessible. In addition, there are only a few databases with outdoor climbing routes that are in access to the public like The Mountain Project or 8A. Without these platforms, climbers who are looking to hit their local crag or boulder may not be able to find routes or know about the quality of them if they do not already have community or word of mouth. While these websites have provided helpful tools to climbers of all experience and skill levels, they are still heavily lacking data and scrapings of these platforms have resulted in DMCA takedowns or lawsuits (3). At the bare minimum, we need better and easier access to climbing data so that data scientists like myself can work to advance the sport for others. As the sport grows so will the influx of data, and with any field that is expanding and rapidly changing, data science can add value to it by making better-informed decisions for multiple stakeholders, generating new insights about its players and audience, and increasing the overall experience for users.
OpenBeta is a non-profit built and run by climbers that enables “open access and innovative uses of climbing data” (1). Though they have also faced several challenges with their attempt to use onX’s data from the Mountain Project with copyright infringement and blocked repositories, according to Outside Learn (3). At the moment their data is public, and Github recently reversed the DMCA takedown thanks to legal efforts from the owner, Viet Nguyen, who is “empowering the community with open license climbing betas and source tools” (1). His goal for OpenBeta is to make climbing data more like an open source project, which in turn would help platforms like Mountain Project to increase their recommendation systems, geolocation data, and the accuracy of submissions (3). In addition to pushing for accessible data, the OpenBeta also posts articles that fit the needs of any climber in STEM: tutorials, current events, and project inspirations like recommendation systems and route quality maps. The community that OpenBeta is fostering aligns heavily with the forward mentality of climbing currently which is: don’t be a gatekeeper, spread the beta, and anyone is capable.
As a young climber and data scientist, I found myself incredibly inspired by OpenBeta’s work and wanted to support the nonprofit by using their data and some of their resources for my capstone project. I want to leverage climbing data to influence decision making for climbers of all skill sets and as a result, contribute to the overarching goal of OpenBeta which is to make the sport of climbing safer, more knowledgeable, and more accessible. Recommendation systems are extremely powerful and if done well, can be a great tool for young climbers when exploring outdoor routes. To get a better understanding of the data and to ensure the viability of this goal, I am performing an exploratory data analysis of the OpenBeta data.
In my process, I took all of the Oregon ratings from the OpenBeta. I first wanted to work with West Coast for a couple reasons. For one, the Sierra Nevada of California and the Cascade Range of the Pacific Northwest are prime western U.S. rock climbing locales. In addition the West Coast is scattered with popular climbing spots (i.e. Yosemite, Joshua Tree, Smith Rock) but there is a common misconception that these areas only have expert graded routes. In reality the opposite is true, and there are actually more beginner to moderate routes than expert ones.
We are only using routes with grades that are in the Yosemite Decimal System, which is the traditional difficulty rating for routes in the US. According to the Yosemite Decimal System, a 5.0 to 5.7 is considered easy, 5.8 to 5.10 is considered intermediate, 5.11 to 5.12 is hard, and 5.13 to 5.15 is reserved for a very elite few. This means that the app will be of use to any climber, as some local classics come even in lower grades.

Furthermore, I decided to hone in on Oregon routes because of the national coverage and booming popularity of California routes. Little people know that the birthplace of sport climbing was brought to Oregon’s Smith Rock State Park by Alan Watts, a famous climbing pioneer, in 1986 (7). Not only is some of the best climbing in the nation found in Oregon’s Smith Rock, there are also hidden gems right in Portland’s backyard that I had to do significant research as a climber to find. It would be even harder for a new climber to discover some of these on their own. Not to mention that most of these routes are for climbers of all skill sets. The idea of my project is that anyone can have access to local classics even in lower grades.
One dataset I used from OpenBeta contains all route ratings in Oregon along with the route ID, grade, name, and type (trad, sport, ice, bouldering, etc.).I’m going to look at only trad and sport routes on the West Coast, which are the most two popular types of outdoor climbing. A limit of this method is that we lose routes that could be both sport and trad. Another dataset I used had aggregate rating data from OpenBeta along with the location of parent walls to use for plotting. The features I used from this dataset are the parent wall ID, name, and location along with the state and ARQI rating (this metric is explained later).
We can see that our data is dominated by sport routes (after all, Oregon is the birth place of sport climbing). This raised a bias concern with an Item Based Collaborative Filtering recommendation system. With that being said, sport climbing is easily the most popular form of climbing nowadays. Not only is trad climbing out of date and mostly done by the pros, it is also extremely expensive and a result, a barrier to entry to the sport itself. Therefore I felt okay about this data imbalance when making a recommendation to a new user: they probably don’t want to be recommended trad routes for lower levels.
As part of my exploratory data analysis, I also wanted to get a breakdown of classic routes. As a metric for route quality, we can look at the aggregate metric RQI or ARQI. The RQI is equal to S(1-1/N) where S is the average stars (or median) and N is the number of votes. As N approaches infinity, (1-1/N) approaches 1 and RQI approaches S. One issue with this metric is that harder routes get fewer ascents and therefore less votes, making it difficult for hard routes to make it into the “classic” class. We will use the Adjusted RQI (ARQI), which corrects for bias of RQI towards easier routes by adjusting the number of votes and therefore doesn’t make route quality a “popularity metric.” The ARQI is equal to S(1-1/Nw) where Nw is the number of weighted or adjusted votes and is determined by the votes-per-route for each grade.
According to the OpenBeta, the categories for route quality are the following:
Note that some routes with a lower ARQI may have a higher median rating. The ARQI takes the number of votes into consideration. This allows for a more accurate and fair route designation (we don’t want just any route falling into a classic).

At the state level, we found that a majority of routes fall in the Good to Area Classic range with outliers in the Bad class. But what about by grade?

We find that a majority of easy and intermediate routes are both classic and area classics, which supports my claim that anyone can climb a classic not only at their local crag but additionally famous big walls climbed by the legends.

After some exploratory data analysis, I wanted to experiment with the functionality of my shiny app. I wanted to design a route finder that would combine a recommendation and route ranking system in a map format using geolocation and ratings data. I used Plotly for interactivity, Mapbox for geocoding, and Shiny for construction of the web application. I accessed a public token from Mapbox in order to do some basic plotting and interactivity with Plotly. First I plotted all parent walls for both trad and sport and colored each wall based on its highest quality route. Then with the idea that the user could filter routes by type, I plotted the routes by type and improved the formatting to be colored and sized by the ARQI (adjusted median rating).